Gender, place and entrepreneurship in the network age : a case study of Shenzhen, China

Abstract

The past three decades have witnessed the rise of the network society, accompanied by the infiltration of information technology into traditional industry and an increase in niche entrepreneurship. Such a grand transformation potentially generates new gender relations in different places. Also, a redefinition of the workplace by communication technology and inter-locking connection between offline and online is observed.

Feminist studies have suggested that gender relations are integral to the production process and vary across places while interweaving with industrial transformation and changing labour markets. As the internet industry is at the core of this grand socioeconomic transformation, this thesis investigates the gender implications for internet entrepreneurship from a feminist geography perspective.

Relevant literature from multiple disciplines on female entrepreneurial study, feminist geography of work, and socioeconomic transformation in a network society is critically revisited. A conceptual framework for understanding gender, place and entrepreneurship during cyber transformation is developed from a perspective of feminist economic geography. Specifically, this thesis attempts to understand the intersection between gender and the internet entrepreneurial process through the evolution of female entrepreneurs in cyber transformation, gendered practices in the workplace, and the presentation of self in cyberspace. A series of qualitative studies based on policy analysis, case study, ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews were conducted.

The first empirical chapter examines gender in cyber transformation of economy and illustrates how female entrepreneurship is situated in the historical interactions between internet industry development, state regulation and the digital divide in China between 1996 and 2018. The early internet development, state intervention and severe digital divide bounds female entrepreneurship, providing limited opportunities to the bureaucratic entrepreneurs, relational individuals and elite returnees. Growing numbers of female professional entrepreneurs, career transitioners and grassroots entrepreneurs are more recently observed, but such inclusiveness of internet entrepreneurship does not indicate the invisibility of gender in the entrepreneurial process.

The second empirical chapter examines gendered practices in coworking spaces. For internet start-ups in China, coworking spaces represent an important venue, supported by the national state as a spatial fix for the transitional crisis. Bottom-up forces also fuel the booming coworking phenomenon. The entry, evaluation and everyday practices in these spaces were examined to unfold the gender implications. The findings suggest that the three highly recognised features of coworking spaces – namely openness, collaboration and community – are imbued with gendered practices. Such offline gendered practices bound online business.

The third empirical chapter explores how female entrepreneurs of knowledge commerce deal with gender identity through self-branding in cyberspace. Evidence demonstrates that female entrepreneurs engage with business in the gender segregated fields, attract a disproportionate number of female followers, and capitalise on gender identity during self-branding. Despite economic empowerment, such practices become ‘stylised acts’ that reaffirm previous gender relations.

In general, gender continues to play specific roles in female entrepreneurship in the network age. Empirical evidence suggests that gender is integrated in the uneven divide of entrepreneurial opportunities, everyday practices in coworking spaces, and identity in cyberspace. Technology evolves, but gender continues to matter during the age of internet entrepreneurship.